ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Panel discussion: Living Queer Histories

·1 hr 11 min·4 clips

Saint Sebastian becomes an icon of fetishistic desire and steadfast endurance.

The room is formally gathered. The opening acknowledgement names the site as unceded land, long tied to creative work, and that responsibility sits over the conversation that follows. Living Queer Histories comes in through Future Remains, the 2024 Macfarlane Commission, where seven artists take up inheritance, legacy, reclamation, reframing, and contemporary practice. The panel does not try to tidy queer history into one neat line. It moves through subcultures, aesthetics, lived experience, and the harder work of bringing overlooked figures back into view. A book becomes the hinge. One speaker spends time with an artist whose motto links life and art, then reads that link across the practice. The praise is warm, but not simple. The same account turns to Throbbing Gristle, Genesis P. Orridge, and the way intimate and creative partnership could also push someone aside and delay recognition. Marginalisation is treated as part of the record, not background noise. The speaker connects magazine actions, striptease, and the female sexualised body to the question of who gets seen, who gets celebrated, and who has to be recovered later. Revision is not just correction here. It is a curatorial habit and a way of talking together, gathering Australian artists whose work makes influence, legacy, and lived experience easier to name in the room. The closing exchange gives the discussion its sting. An audience member says Destiny would have loved hearing her work spoken about this way, and suddenly the talk carries witness, respect, and personal memory. Myles Russell-Cook then introduces himself with care. As senior curator of Australian and First Nations art, a Wachapaluck man, and a gay man, he sets professional authority beside lived experience of homophobia. His question changes the temperature. Taking up Alicia's idea that big change requires big change, he asks how curatorial practice should respond when queer, in the Australian art context, can read as a very European and white concept. That is where the panel lands hardest. It listens for queer histories while refusing to treat them as neutral, settled, or separate from recognition, gendered experience, and responsibility.

As heard by us

A thoughtful panel on queer memory, artistic inheritance, and who gets written into the record.

ACA's Living Queer Histories panel treats queer history as something to be handled, argued with, and put back into circulation. Linked to Future Remains and the 2024 Macfarlane Commission, it moves between curatorial framing and lived experience without losing its center.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a thoughtful panel on queer history, art, and visibility, start here.

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